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Deag writes "A mega colony of one family of ants has spread all over the world. Previous mega colonies in California, Europe and Japan have been shown to be in fact one global colony.
Ants from the smaller super-colonies were always aggressive to one another. So ants from the west coast of Japan fought their rivals from Kobe, while ants from the European super-colony didn't get on with those from the Iberian colony.
But whenever ants from the main European and Californian super-colonies and those from the largest colony in Japan came into contact, they acted as if they were old friends."

One thing is for certain: there is no stopping them; the ants will soon be here. And I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords. I'd like to remind them that as a trusted TV personality I could be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground sugar caves.

Well, this reporter was...possibly a little hasty earlier and would like to...reaffirm his allegiance to this country and its human president. May not be perfect, but it's still the best government we have. For now.

That episode was a total rip-off/tribute/remake of the short story Leningen versus the Ants by Carl Stephenson.This story was in my elementary school reading book the same year that episode originally aired.

I find a good way to stop them from coming in from under a door is to stick a piece of duct tape across the bottom so that it just touches the floor. The overlords stick to it and won't establish a trail going underneath, which is handy when you're not in a welcoming mood.

It works for Jehovahs Witnesses. Just replace the duct tape with high-strength contact adhesive. Its worth it to see the look of surprise and delight when you say "do come in" change to surprise then panic when they realise they can't. I then just shut the door and say "ah well, maybe another time".

You know, if you replaced "Jehovahs Witnesses" and "they can't" with "anyone who comes to my house" and "I'm going to harvest their organs for sale on the Mexican black market" in that paragraph, I would be able to relate to it completely.

Liberals can sneak in under doors and windows, through vents, or through any opening to the outside. You need to cover all cracks and openings with duct tape at least until there is no airflow or any ventilation to the outside so they can't get in and take your guns away.

I disagree. Here's my citation:
"Is it Duct or Duck? We donâ(TM)t want you to be confused, so we will explain. The first name for Duct Tape was DUCK. During World War II the U.S. Military needed a waterproof tape to keep the moisture out of ammunition cases. So, they enlisted the Johnson and Johnson Permacel Division to manufacture the tape. Because it was waterproof, everyone referred to it as âoeduckâ tape (like water off a duckâ(TM)s back). Military personnel discovered that the tape was good for lots more than keeping out water. They used it for Jeep repair, fixing stuff on their guns, strapping equipment to their clothing... the list is endless.

After the War, the housing industry was booming and someone discovered that the tape was great for joining the heating and air conditioning duct work. So, the color was changed from army green to the silvery color we are familiar with today and people started to refer to it as âoeduct tape*.â Therefore, either name is appropriate."

Another Source [ideafinder.com]
"The original use was to keep moisture out of the ammunition cases. Because it was waterproof, people referred to the tape as "Duck Tape." Also, the tape was made using cotton duck - similar to what was used in their cloth medical tapes. Military personnel quickly discovered that the tape was very versatile and used it to fix their guns, jeeps, aircraft, etc. After the war, the tape was used in the booming housing industry to connect heating and air conditioning duct work together.

Soon, the color was changed from Army green to silver to match the ductwork and people started to refer to duck tape as "Duct Tape." Things changed during the 1970s, when the partners at Manco, Inc. placed rolls of duct tape in shrink wrap, making it easier for retailers to stack the sticky rolls. Different grades and colors of duct tape werenÂt far behind. Soon, duct tape became the most versatile tool in the household. "

I don't think it's the blue (but I don't know that), however it's definitely the chalk. Find an ant on a white wall, and get a nice thick chalk line around him. Just regular old white chalk. But the heavier and thicker the better. Anyway, the ant is trapped. He'll play the roll of the pong ball for a while and then drop to the floor, only to climb back up your wall.

You know what's awesome about slashdot? That I could laugh at this post... before I clicked the story.

That's the great thing about the Standard Joke Set: Jokes from the Standard Joke Set can be used and enjoyed with minimal related context, and only the simplest of introductions. Because the audience already knows and likes the joke, jokes from the Standard Joke Set never fail to amuse.

Of course, using Standard Jokes in this way is somewhat suboptimal from a bandwidth utilization standpoint. The joke is shared knowledge, so really all that is needed is some unique way of identifying the joke. One method

There was an Arthur C Clarke short story entitled "Retreat from Earth" which involved a hostile Alien being discovering that a giant termite colony was being controlled by an alien machine in the core of the Earth dedicated to safeguarding humanity, and in the end, single handedly repels the invasion.

Luckily, just like in the movies, scientists are completely fungible. Studying retroviruses one day, building robots the next, astrophysics the day after that... In fact, every entomologist was actually torn directly from a sick child's bedside, and is using equipment stolen from the World Cure for Cancer Project.

Aside from the obvious sarcasm of the above, ants are, even in the crudest economic terms, quite worth studying. Anything that spends its(quite plentiful) time gnawing on our infrastructure and food crops is.

It's also important to discover which species in our planet can actually construct a biosocial structure which matches ours in terms of geographical scope, spanning great oceans without any loss of social integrity. It's one thing to migrate across an ocean - its another thing to migrate across an ocean and not mutate to your environment, which would "cut" you off from the colony. I'm no ant-man, but its my assumption that colonies are identified by sets of pheromones, and I'm assuming that evolution or genetic mutation would impact these pheromones. The fact that these ants can survive nearly anywhere in the world , and also maintain a social bond, is pretty astonishing - and well worth studying.

I'm not sure why people make the complaint that some scientific research (like this) is a waste of time.

I know some scientists who are very human focused. They research something, say cancer, because they really want to help some of the victims they know. If they aren't focused on particularly immediate human scale problems, still they try to watch for ways whatever they are doing can contribute to human happiness or sheer survival. I know others who are mostly value neutral. To one of them, you could talk about breakthroughs in cloning, and he'd ask if they had any uses for fruit-fly studies and if it didn't, he really wouldn't care one way or another. That's pretty much distanced from a 'normal human focus', but the worst thing this guy could possibly do to anyone would be to maybe convince congress to spend a little too much on fruit-fly research. Why is this a big deal in evaluating a scientist?

I mean, I know some businessmen who give away extra shoes to needy children. I know a lot more who are focused on the bottom line. Almost never do I hear the ones who are focused on their own profits accused of wasting their lives or the time or money of everyone else. Some people may accuse them of greed, but not of being out of touch with human concerns. For lots of professions, having a focus on the bigger picture, thinking about the long term consequences of what you are doing is totally optional, and nobody expects to hear a phrase such as 'for the good of the whole human race'. Nobody criticizes a lawyer for focusing on inter-business contract law instead of becoming a crusading DA and putting more criminals away. Nobody really argues that cosmetic surgeons are evil for not doing heart surgery instead. It's just something in the way they think about science.

I know some politicians who, when they first heard about cloning, jumped to the idea of building clone armies to conquer the world thirty seconds later. I have never met a biologist who thought that way. If some people slam any scientist who isn't focused on local, immediate, human issues, why do those same people so seldom worry about some politicians who sound like movie cliche mad scientists?

I usually argue that research such as this example will probably feed back into the whole institution that is science, and benefit humanity in the long run anyway. I still think that's true, but let's assume I'm totally wrong on that point, and it and things like it will totally waste 0.0002% of the world's budgets, and accomplish nothing of significant interest to the bulk of humanity, ever. That makes it about like model trains. Who goes around bemoaning the vast, inhumane waste that is model train hobbydom?

Well the difference is you're paying for your model trains with your own money, whereas the scientist is being paid with *our* money. Big difference.

The same goes for the difference between a business man focused on the bottom line and a scientist. The public never complains about companies performing useless research, they complain about government paid scientists doing useless research.

I'm guessing the reason they didn't mutate to their environment is that their spread across the globe was assisted by humans accidentally, and thus happened much faster than their evolution would allow. They've only been that widespread fairly recently, in the grand scheme of things (like in the past few hundred years), like humans of any particular widespread ethnicity, they can recognize each other as being similar.

Now, if the different supercolonies across the globe manage to all get along and work together, the ants are ahead of us for sure.

Isn't it also possible that this is an example of convergent evolution? What if the family of chemicals these ants use to identify each other just happens to be the 'most efficient' one? What if it takes just a little bit less energy to produce it and it spreads just a little bit farther than chemicals that other ant families use? Isn't it at least possible that these ants aren't related to each other at all?

Because "queen" when referring to ants has a completely different meaning than "queen" when referring to the ruler of a country? Not all people in the UK are biological children hatched from eggs laid by Queen Elizabeth, although it's been a while since I've cracked open a biology textbook.

It's not so surprising though - it just means that the ants have been able to spread faster than their rate of evolution/mutation. Otherwise, they would have differentiated/speciated first. But because it's so easy for them to hitch rides on passing people, cars, boats, and airplanes, they've spread a lot faster than they would naturally have been able to.

The more interesting thing will be to observe over time and see how long it takes before their super-colony collapses or is torn apart by civil war. Of course that's not likely to occur until their paths of transport and communication are disrupted. If we don't destroy ourselves first, thus giving them a long time to continue to evolve in total connectedness, I guess things will get interesting for them down the road...

The other interesting point this raises is about language and communication in general - biologists frequently talk about animals communicating with each other via whatever their particular mechanisms may be, but they seem to assume that all the members of a species are homogeneous in their communication methods. That's a pretty naive assumption, given all the different vocal and non-vocal mechanisms various human tribes use to communicate. The interesting question here will be whether this super-colony is an example of genocide (the total annihilation of different/competing ant species) or assimilation...

You know what's even worse? There are people getting paid to perform music, write screenplays, assemble television sets, sell insurance, and mix up alcoholic beverages for people. Have they run out of diseases to investigate, plagues to cure?

I wonder how long it would take for the geographically isolated colonies (who share the same mega-colony ancestry) to drift enough that they lose their association with the parent mega-colony, and cease to treat other sub-colonies as friends.

How much variation in the cuticle hydrocarbons is acceptable? Are there specific 'marker' hydrocarbons that help differentiate between colonies? Genetically, is it a matter of different intron expression, or is it variation within a single intron? How many base pairs are involved if that's the case?

Damn, I knew I shouldn't have coffee this late.

Well, I'm off to plunder the depths of the internet in hopes of learning more about ant colony differentiation. Adieu!

The ant is what happens when a species finds a niche and becomes so exquisitely adapted to it that further evolution is almost always detrimental. For a short time genetic change remains advantageous so long as it results in less genetic change. So you get the whole "single queen" reproductive model. The fact that ants have not completely lost their ability to sexually reproduce indicates that some advantage is still to be gained by it, but its most likely more about passing on antibodies than it is genes.

They call it one super colony because closely related ants move freely between the smaller colonies, but each queen is genetically distinct. Genetic drift should affect them the same as any other species of ant.

Well, I'm off to plunder the depths of the internet in hopes of learning more about ant colony differentiation. Adieu!

I'm back. Whew! Plundering the depths of the internet is exhausting.

I didn't manage to learn much about ant colony differentiation, but I did learn that:

1. A leaf-cutter ant queen mates only once - just before establishing a new colony. She can then keep the sperm viable for up to 15 years and produce as many as 300 million offspring (Wow!).2. The study of ants is called Myrmecology.3. In heraldry the two-tailed mermaid is shown full face with the ends of her tails held in each hand. Both single-tailed and double-tailed varieties symbolize eloquence. If she has her comb and mirror with her then it means vanity.4. You can buy cheap bathroom vanities from some site called vanities.pronto.com.5. If you mispell "pronto" while googling with safesearch turned off, the results are um... interesting.6. Adult chat tends to focus on certain subjects. And "LilMissHotty69" is actually a guy from Peoria, IL named Bob who is into fishing and fixing up GTOs. Who knew?

Maybe plundering the depths of the internet is not the best way to learn about an esoteric subject when hopped up on caffeine.

Well, I'm off to plunder the depths of the internet in hopes of learning more about ant colony differentiation. Adieu!

I'm back. Whew! Plundering the depths of the internet is exhausting.
I didn't manage to learn much about ant colony differentiation, but I did learn that:
1. A leaf-cutter ant queen mates only once - just before establishing a new colony. She can then keep the sperm viable for up to 15 years and produce as many as 300 million offspring (Wow!).
2. The study of ants is called Myrmecology.
3. In heraldry the two-tailed mermaid is shown full face with the ends of her tails held in each hand. Both single-tailed and double-tailed varieties symbolize eloquence. If she has her comb and mirror with her then it means vanity.
4. You can buy cheap bathroom vanities from some site called vanities.pronto.com.
5. If you mispell "pronto" while googling with safesearch turned off, the results are um... interesting.
6. Adult chat tends to focus on certain subjects. And "LilMissHotty69" is actually a guy from Peoria, IL named Bob who is into fishing and fixing up GTOs. Who knew?
Maybe plundering the depths of the internet is not the best way to learn about an esoteric subject when hopped up on caffeine.

The movie he was referring to was Phase IV. [wikipedia.org] The last line still haunts me.On a related note, if you haven't read Charles Stross' award-winning 2007 novella "Missile Gap", read it now. [subterraneanpress.com]

One supercolony makes it sound like they have organization (of the ant-ish variety) that spans the globe. This is just a bunch of small colonies whose scents are so similar that members of the other colonies are unable to discern that they are, in fact, not from their own colony.

Makes you wonder though, is it possible for a worker to wander away from her own colony and be accepted into another? Could that even be happening regularly? How about on rare occasions? If a queen dies unexpectedly, would a whole bunch of workers just move to a colony that still had one? How likely is it that drones released from one colony will fertilize local queens and how likely distant ones - is this different from other ant types? Do this bunch's drones and pre-mating queens fly farther from the pare

I had these ants in my old house. Seal up one path and they find another. Put a pesticide on the baseboards and they run across the ceiling. The liquid ant bait/poison kills them, but they keep coming. I used a whole lot of the stuff and there was a 1/4" layer of dead ants in the room and they kept coming. It turns out that the anthills are all connected and they will even add a local hill if they find something that seems like a good source of food.

On a recent trip to Jamaica, we had some tiny little ants in a nest in the bathroom wall. I discovered that they wouldn't cross invisible Vaseline lines rubbed on the wall.

Well, after a few days, I had created complex Vaseline mazes for the ants with food smudges at strategic locations. Got them to spell out my name with their ant trails. Wife wasn't as impressed as you might imagine.

a) Follow them back to find the colony. Boil 4-8 gallons of water i a big stock pot, kick the top off of the ant hill, and dump it down. The boiling water will rapidly travel along all of the tunnels and it should reach the queen, taking out the whole colony at once.

b) Bait the places where they enter your house with a liquid borax/sugar mixture. These ant mixtures are available at any store. The ants take the food and bing it back to the colony, where they all eat it - and the borax eventually kills all of them.

Here in Massachusetts they're so common and they're pretty much the first ant I ever saw in my back yard as a child in the 70's that I figured they were native.(They're all over the place. Hell, I only found out they're an invasive species last year. That's how completely settled in these little guys are.) Also unlike fire ants they don't bite but man do they breed like crazy.(I know I should get rid of them from my yard but most of the time they don't actually do anything to annoy me. When I see them it's pretty much "Who cares?" which is not my response when I see carpenter ants or yellow jackets.) They're definitely doing something right.

So ants from California to Japan realize that they have a common origin, and therefore refuse to fight.

If only human beings were that smart. Think of the energy expended on wars over the last 20,000 years or so. Now imagine if all that effort had gone into peaceful science/technology. We probably would have Mars terraformed by now, and be working on colonizing Alpha Centauri.

But instead we waste our time and energy killing each other because one group worships some invisible being called "Allah", while another group worships an invisible being called "God", etcetera.

Duct tape? Commissioned by the military. Jet planes? First made by the Luftwaffe. Electronic computers? First made for codebreaking. Nuclear energy? Manhattan project. First man in space? Cold War. The Internet.

Like it or not, wars have driven at least a significant portion of technological advancement. Ironic that you're complaining on a computer, over the Internet.

You're actually reinforcing Absolut's point. Why should we need war to develop all that cool stuff? Why can't we fund their development on their own merits, rather than as an avenue for killing more people?

Because we're dumber than ants.

And the jet engine was actually patented first in England, almost ten years before WW2 began. The Germans were the first to put it into a production aircraft.

I know you're joking but, being an ex-patternmaker and working for a foundry, I can tell you this:

You need to add runners and risers to the nest before pouring. The runners will feed the metal into the correct holes and the risers will store heat allowing the metal to flow without freezing too quickly. You also have to remember that the metal will freeze quicker on the outside of the tubes, leaving the middle potions free to flow. High yields aren't an option with too many runners though - it's a Fettler's nightmare too.

Yay! 4 years training, and 4 years practicing, just to explain this on Slashdot!

what a coincidence, I too once was in D.C. in a big marble building and had the same thought about pouring molten aluminum into obnoxious holes atop caverns festering with evil and spewing forth pestilence. Those weren't ant holes, but a pair of a-holes.